Just Look at Who is Supporting Obama? [incl. Rashid Khalidi]

What do seventy percent of Florida's Jewish voters have in common with Khadaffi, Ahmdinejad, Hezballah, and Hamas?

They are all supporting Barack Obama for the presidency.

Now, this is not one of those situations where a common political issue makes for strange bedfellows, unless of course you, like Oprah, believe Obama is the Messiah.

This is a more like two guys buying the same stock, one because it is going to go up and the other because he intends to sell it short. Both are on opposite sides of the same trade.

So who got this one right?

My money is decidedly on Khadaffi and the people in Gaza making those Internet-based phone calls to get Americans to vote for "The One."

Take a good, hard look at who Barack Obama has advising him on the Middle East. There is Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, a man whose antipathy toward Israel is almost legendary. There is Robert Malley, whose father was devoted to the destruction of Israel, and the man who created the fiction, widely embraced on the left, that it was Ehud Barack, and not Yassir Arafat, who torpedoed the Camp David peace negotiations. In Malley's case, the apple appears to have not fallen far from the tree. Outrage over Malley's direct contacts with Hamas finally proved too controversial for Obama, as he was courting Florida's Jewish community. After denying Malley's role in the campaign, Obama sacked him from the role he did not have, Malley's relationship with Obama goes back to their law school days at Harvard.

And, of course, there is Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian professor whom Barack Obama credits with opening his own eyes on the Middle East, a man who has intellectually justified terrorism against Israelis.

On October 29, CNN reporter Campbell Brown gave us a rendition of the Obama-Khalidi relationship so removed from reality that it was a new low point even for the network whose Baghdad office imposed an unprecedented self-censorship in not reporting Saddam Hussein's crimes against humanity.

As has widely been reported Obama was present at a send-off dinner for Khalidi as he was leaving the University of Chicago to be installed in the Edward Said Chair of Middle East Studies at Columbia. At this dinner, a number of scurrilous attacks on Israel and America were made. Did Obama express indignation and leave? Did Obama actively participate in those outbursts? What did he do?

CNN not only turned Khalidi into a mild mannered intellectual, but embraced the Los Angeles Times' rationale for withholding the tape. Campbell Brown doesn't even blanch while reading the teleprompter. After all, real journalists risk life and limb to report the news. News organizations often skirt, if not violate, journalistic ethics just to get a story, as in obtaining the purloined medical records of Vice Presidential Candidate Thomas Eagleton. When it comes to a choice between reporting the news and possibly jeopardizing national security, news organizations have erred on the side of reporting the news.

So, to see one news organization justifying the withholding of the news by another is not only a rare event, it is an unprecedented event. And it begs the question, what is on the tape that is so damning to the Obama candidacy?

Because we all know that if Rashid Khalidi was shown to be the mild-mannered intellectual CNN portrays him as and if the celebratory event contained none of the outbursts that it is otherwise reported to have, the Times would not only have splashed the story across the front page, but Campbell Brown wouldn't be reading a teleprompter justifying withholding of news, we'd be watching the tape.

My bet is that the real Barack Obama is the guy who besmeared his senatorial office by involving himself in the domestic affairs of Kenya while campaigning for his genocidal cousin Raila Odinga, a man who promised to bring Sharia to Kenya. The real Barack Obama is the man who said in Iowa that no one has suffered as much as the Palestinian People. The real Barack Obama is the guy the Los Angeles Times won't let us see on the Khalidi tape.

Muamar Khadaffi and the people of Gaza understand who the real Barack Obama is, and so too do Americans voting from Israel. You see, as of this morning, unlike their naïve co-religionists in Florida, they voted overwhelmingly for McCain.

They voted as if their lives depend on it. Because their lives really do depend on it!

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science and editor of Terrorism. The Media and the Law (Transnational Publishers).

Note: Articles listed under "Middle East studies in the News" provide information on current developments concerning Middle East studies on North American campuses. These reports do not necessarily reflect the views of Campus Watch and do not necessarily correspond to Campus Watch's critique.